“The Dead” by James Joyce, from Dubliners, centers around the events that take place at an annual Christmas party in Dublin, Ireland. This short story follows the protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, who is thrust into these events, and is the only...

The choices manufactured on a day-to-day basis effect every choice and action in the future. Unfortunately, these choices can be based off different constrictions and outside forces. Throughout the years ones gender could play a extensive part in...

What happens to a dream deferred? According to James Joyce, perhaps nothing. Illustrated in his short story Eveline, this Dublin-born author both poses and responds to the age old-question of comfort versus risk. In a time of upheaval throughout...

In the short story “The Dead,” James Joyce displays his character Gabriel as pretentious and misogynistic through emphasizing his wealth, education, and presumed superiority to the women in his society. Gabriel, who requires constant reassurance...

‘How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it…’

Virginia Woolf’s The Mark on the Wall suggests a number of ways of considering the mundane in...

Darkness and light are everywhere, and one cannot exist without the other. However, a combination of the two creates shadows in which a world can be altered into a form of dusk, twilight. It is in this shadowy light that a person may find...

The theme of childhood is typically presented as one of happiness and youthful freedom. James Joyce takes a different approach, however, as he exposes the vulnerability that naturally comes with childhood but is often not expressed in literature....

‘[T]he modern period […] begins really with the late nineteenth [century], when the sense of the passing of a major phase of English history was already in the air.’ Indeed, when we discuss ‘modern’ in terms of literature this tends to be a...

A deconstructionist has many duties, and among them are deriving multiple meanings from a source as well as a destruction of previous criticisms of said source. This essay on deconstruction will take another look at James Joyce’s short story “...

Dubliners was published in 1914 and written by James Joyce, who was born in 1882. When applying feminist theory to the Dubliners short stories, one must keep in mind that although feminism had its start in the 19th century, many of the formative...

Throughout history, every generation sees its fair share of change and innovation, but when James Joyce first made his literary debut with Dubliners, shortly after the turn of the 20th century, change was occurring with a rapidity never before...

Religion has been at the heart of Irish identity for centuries, with Christianity being introduced around the 4th century CE. This has also been the focus for much of the political tension between Ireland and England in the more recent centuries....

In James Joyce’s collection of short stories Dubliners the stories are put in chronological order so it seems that the characters are slowly becoming older and older both physically and mentally. The collection of stories first start off with a...

Ignorance may be bliss, but knowledge is power. Plato created “Allegory of the Cave” to define the structure of society and illustrate the pursuit of knowledge—or lack thereof. On the other hand, James Joyce’s “Eveline” portrays a more...

Vexation and disillusionment are prevalent themes in many of the stories in Dubliners, but male frustration is arguably strongest in two of those stories: Araby and Counterparts. In these stories, Joyce portrays male frustration in different...

As a homeless man once professed on LA local news after being robbed for the sixth consecutive week, “When we are beaten down, we must always remember that God shall always be waiting as our crutch”. While the words are moving, they are certainly...

Joycean critics frequently encourage the uninitiated to read Joyce with an emotional detachment. Scholars are taught to marvel at the aesthetic complexity of his prose with an “almost religious attitude”, under the dictatorial guidance of...

Joyce’s presentation of friendship focusses upon what is expected of it and how one wishes to experience it, contrasted with what it really is and how one actually experiences it. While the narrator begins ‘The Sisters’ with a degree of openness:...

There is an astonishing relationship between “Exiles” (1914) by James Joyce and “The Story of An Hour” (1894) by Kate Chopin. They indeed share different themes - For the former, themes such as suffering, betrayals and personal freedom are...